The Science of Coincidence

That was that was a fun one. Got into some of the uh the de sci fi possibilities for the future in terms of monstrosity. And Joe's joining me this week, going in for Julie to talk about the science of coincidence. So I've got one for you. Tell me if you've heard this one before. Lincoln and Kennedy. Oh, yes, you know this. I was first exposed to this in middle school when a teacher of mine get gave us a list to these like it was some kind of really

important fact we needed to learn. But yeah, how about this. Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, two American presidents, both were elected to Congress in the year forty six. Lincoln in eighteen forty six, Kennedy in nineteen forty six. Both were elected president in the year sixty, Lincoln in eighteen sixty, Kennedy in nineteen sixty. Each of their last names both contains seven letters uh. And then there's this whole list of coincidences that keeps going. They were both shot in

the head, they were both assassinated by Southerners. They were both succeeded by Southerners. Their vice presidents were Southerners. Both vice presidents were named Johnson. What are the odds? Yeah, I remember this being rolled out, perhaps in a history class, and uh, you know that the list would start about these coincidences, and I would kind of tune out after

the first one or two. Um. And I guess that that kind of boils down to the type of p in the world, Like there there are people out there who just tune out after the first coincidence or two, and then there are those who obsess about it and see this as as something something really crucial and something really telling about these two men, about the history of this nation, et cetera. That might be the difference between

this Robert, because I did not tune out. I was my mind was blown to uh, to borrow from a popular phrase. Yeah, I I sat there in my desk like, wow, what are the odds? You know, must be some kind of ghost spirit controlling this. It just I was amazed. There two twin souls are basically the same entity, reincarnated and and and tracked hunted by the same extra dimensional force. Yeah. Or there was some sort of like cosmic literature teacher trying to get me to observe parallels between the meaning

of these two men. Yeah, it's another one of course that comes to mind is the of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two individuals who, of course a very interconnected in the history of the United States as well, both instrumental in drafting the Declaration of Independence, which was signed to July fourth, seventeen seventy six. Both men died on the same day, July four, eighteen twenty six, exactly fifty

years to the day after the document was ratified. So that that you know that that kind of hits you like. I like that one because that one's nice and succinct. You know, what were the chances? You don't need a list, Yeah, it's right there. Yeah, I mean they were they were good friends. So maybe there was you could imagine some level of synchronicity about, you know, when you're giving up and sort of handing it over to the reaper. But

but the dates are are kind of compelling there. It would be even crazier, though, if I found out now that you played John Adams in a production of seventeen seventy six. No, but I was in a production of seven times. Here you go, I played Thomas Jefferson and been a production of seventeen seventy six. So we're tied into it too. There's no escaping the black hole of coincidence. Okay, I've got an even crazier coincidence. No, it's probably not.

This is kind of dumb, but why do so many action heroes have the initials JB James Bond, Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer, Jack Burton my favorite? Well, I mean, what are the chances? Actually, we have no idea, do we? Yeah? I haven't read any I mean maybe there's some really deep statistical study on this out there, but uh yeah, maybe is it? Is? It? On one hand, is just

possibly pure luck. And we only pick up right on there there being a j B here, a JB there because we're also not taking into account all the other j B initials out there, like like does Jim Bean factor into this, Probably not, and all of the action heroes that aren't j B s. Yeah, And then to what extent is it just completely almost subconscious, you know, because you have an action hero, and and by extension of action hero, you think of mythological hero and the

symbolic power of the hero and how it resonates through through our culture and through through our our the way we view the world, and and perhaps that ends up informing it. You know, you have James Bond in your mind, and then you end up creating Jason Bourne and Jack Bauer in the same way. And I'm just purely spitballing here. You could perhaps have the mythic hercules in your mind, and then when you need to create another, you know, mythically strong hero, perhaps you go with the Hulk. That's

the same kind of consonants. Yeah. We associate sounds with with ideas certainly. Yeah. Now another crazy one. And I love this one, uh, in part because it involves Edgar Allan Poe. Of course, Edgar Allan Poe only wrote one novel his entire career. You know, mostly known for his his excellent short stories, but the novel in question published an eight thirty eight the narrative of author Gordon Pym

of Nantucket. I've never read it, never mean, I never read it there, but uh, the fiction of this story is you have a crew of a ship called Grampus. They wind up adrift with no food or water, and so first they catch it toward us. They eat it, but eventually they have to draw straws to see who winds up has dinner. And uh, an individual named Richard Parker draws the short straw, so they stab him and then they eat him. And then they build a house on the boat so that they can bury him behind

the wall. Yeah, I mean, you gotta play the greatest hits, right, Here's where it gets crazy. Years later, in four a yacht named the minion Net leaves England, is headed towards Sydney, Australia, and it sinks in a storm. Four men wind up adrift in a lifeboat. They catch a turtle. They eat it all right, But again you're probably thinking at this point, Okay, you know turtles, how hard are they to catch? There

are lots of turtles in the world, they're all tasty. Yeah, and if you're four men in a boat in the middle of nowhere and you're hungry, you're gonna eat it. No good deal. But then it turns to cannibalism, and this too you might think, well, what a four guys in the middle in the middle of the ocean in a little boat. They're hungry, They've only had one turtle to eat. It's kind of inevitable, right, Well, this is

this is crazy. But aboard this vessel, you have a seventeen year old named Richard Parker, the same name as the individual they ate in pose novel. This guy falls overboard, drinks a bunch of seawater to quench his thirst. Uh, and so he starts going. He starts deteriorating really quickly here and they side, well, he's he's about to die. We're gonna have to eat him, and they eat him.

So you have these this fictional account of cannibalism seeming to inform this real life act of cannibalism years later and in almost identical circumstances. Yeah, and it's so gruesome you can really doubt that they staged it to happen on purpose. Because of the novel. Yeah, Like I can't imagine them being on the boat and someone saying, look, I read this book, and uh, there was a guy in the book named Richard Parker and they ate him in. Your name's Richard Parker. So I'm not saying we have

to eat you, but come on. Yeah, it's like the worst school play every exactly Alright. So, uh, in this we're talking about coincidence, and in this episode we're talking about coincidence and the science of coincidence, how we perceive a coincidence. Uh, but let's let's get down to brass tacks. What exactly is a coincidence? Yeah, and specifically, I think we should think about what's the difference between a coincidence

and just an improbable event? Um so of standard Oxford Dictionaries, definition is a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection. Okay, So that's sort of playing up on the like the two different things coinciding, like like the pim right, like the Gordon Pim example, or like Jefferson and Adams, you know, dying on the same day.

Another way of putting it is that it's a concurrence of events that is quote perceived as meaningfully related with no apparent causal connection, um and and that quotes from a paper that we're gonna end up talking about later in this episode. But I think that's something we should highlight, is that a coincidence has a perceptual element. It's something that seems to be important to us, like it has

a psychic weight. But you know it, it kind of comes back to what we're talking about earlier about the two students in the classroom. One of them is just enthralled by the Kennedy Lincoln coincidence list and the other is, uh, it's just tunes out on it. Because that that kind of comes down to how we can look at coincidence

in the life. You can either say it's just pure dumblock, is just a matter of statistics, And then there's the the the view that there's something else going on here, that there is some sort of connected, connective tissue that we were just not privy to. And we have seen some very you know, thoughtful and informed study on both sides of the issue. Right there have been brilliant people throughout the years who paid way more attention to coincidences

than we might today. I mean, we all experience coincidences. I would be shocked if was someone who would say, no, I've never experienced anything like a really weird concurrence. It happens every single day. It happened to us we were talking about while we were researching these podcasts, so like just strange topics coming up and seemingly unrelated episodes. Yeah, I mean, of course that kind of gets down to that, like the power of coincidence. Coincidence can can kill you,

Coincidence can can make you rich. Coincidence can just be this seemingly meaningless, little connective tissue between two things. Um, and it's a trapped It's so easy to fall into, especially given how important causation and determination are in human culture. Right, And we'll get more into that later, but I mean, you you almost can't fault an individual for for thinking about these coincidences in terms of some sort of connection. Now,

and you see it at every level. I mean, what is the meat cute and every romantic comedy, it's always some kind of coincidence that brings people together. And on the opposite end, you've got famous scientists who have tried to investigate, you know, what's the meaning of coincidences. I think one great example is the Austrian biologists Paul Camera. Uh you know, if if you ever have that feeling like, wow,

I think everything's connected, he did too. So Paul Camera lived from eighteen eighty to nineteen twenty six and he was a proponent of Lamarckian evolution. Have you ever I'm sure you're familiar with this, the one to just give everyone a quick reminder, the idea that say giraffes, their next grow long because they're reaching for those top those top leaves, and so it's like one generation informing the next. Yeah. So normally, now what we believe is min Dalian genetics.

You know, you inherit, you inherit your genetic traits from your parents germ cells, and you pass those same genetic traits onto your kids. And unless you have a certain mutation, that can be basically random. But the Lamarchian ideas where that you could you know, maybe if you work out a lot or something, your kids will be born with bigger muscles or something will strain your neck trying to reach something in this life, and in the next life, your kids will have longer necks by virtue of your

your straining. Yeah, and so in one famous experiment, Camera claimed to have caused male specimens of a of an animal called the midwife toad to grow these black forearm paths that some species of male toads have, and that they used them to hold onto females during mating. Unfortunately, some other scientists in the field examined Camera specimens and found that the black pads on his toads had been injected with artificial inc and so Camera denied responsibility for that.

And I guess nobody really knows whose fault that was. But the accusation here would be that he cheated, right, which is important because we'll come back to cheating. Right. But Camera wasn't only interested in toads and inheritance. He was also interested in coincidences, like he kept a diary of daily coincidences. And just one example against it in a in a paper that we're going to bring up in a bit, his brother in law tells him that he attended to concert and held both the ticket for

seat number nine and the coach check ticket numbered nine. WHOA, yeah, yeah, But anyway, that itself doesn't seem all that interesting until you start making lists which Camera did, and he added them up over time. And I have to admit, when you add it's it's kind of like the Lincoln Kennedy thing. The first one isn't all that interesting until you start adding them together, and then it really gets your attention.

There's this cumulative effect of this, like snowballing kind of attention, getting significance of coincidences that pile up on each other. So Camera organized these thoughts into a hypothesis he called the law of seriality, uh. And he posited basically this underlying force in reality that was a quote world mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope that brings like objects and events together. So almost a kind of of emergent order, uh in the chaos yet show which I could buy into it.

And we see in emergences as a major topic in understanding and intelligence, evolution, etcetera. So why not coincidence? Sure? But of course Camera wasn't the only scientist who has been interested in coincidences and who has attributed some significant role in the universe to them. Carl Young. Carl Young loved coincidences. Carl So. Carl Young was a Swiss psychiatrist. You've probably heard of him. As sort of like a he's one of the big names in psychology and psychiatry,

following Freud. You know, it's like the Mantle, I think union and the big big tents. But Young was was very much into sort of interesting borderline magical esoteric ideas. So he loved the paranormal. He was interested in meaningful connections and mystical truths, eesp astrology, psychokinesis, all kinds of stuff like that, and so naturally he was really interested in coincidences. And so he wrote a book called Synchronicity

and a Causal Connecting Principle. And this book was actually, uh it was I think extracted from a larger volume of his work and eventually published on its own. But I read this book when I was in college, and I remember thinking, at the time, yet again playing up on my I guess I'm susceptible to this kind of thing. I was like, I wonder if he's onto something here. It seemed really interesting. So what kind of coincidences did Young notice? Well, he gives one example. This is the

one that's always cited. It's it's it's his favorite example. It's the Golden Scaub. So in a nineteen fifty one. I believe it was essay on synchronicity. Young told the story that he had been seeing a female patient for psychoanalysis, and Young believed basically that she was languishing because she was in sort of a prison of rationality. She was just too rational. She she wouldn't quote open up to the human side of life. For Young, I think this

had a decidedly sort of supernatural tinge to it. And um, he wanted to uh and this is from a particular translation quote sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding. So one day she was in psychoanalysis telling him about a dream she'd had where someone gave her a golden scar rub. And Young claims at that very moment, an insect started knocking against the window of the office where they were, and he opened the window and he caught the insect and it was a beatle. It was a

scarub type of beetle. And he said it was like a green color, but in the right light it reflected the light and looked gold. And then he presented it to her in this moment of you know, one of those there are more things in heaven and Earth than dreamt of in your fullosophy kind of moments, and and he hoped that this helped shatter her rationalism. And so

I don't know if that happened to me. If I had just been talking about a beetle and then a beatle started knocking against the window, I'd probably think that was interesting. But I don't know if I designed any meaning to it. Yeah, it doesn't really smack of just Heaven sent beetle sent to you know, open up my mind and make me more you know, in love with life, because they're probably just a lot of beetles flying around

out of there. Sure, but Young commented that when coincidences like these accumulate, it's what we were talking about earlier. The more of them happened, the more we take note of them, uh, and with good reason, because it's harder to explain them away by random chance. The more they accumulate, you fill up that entire diary with them, right. Yeah,

it has weight to it exactly. So Young came up with this term synchronicity to describe the a causal connecting principle that links meaningfully significant events that couldn't be connected by physical causes. So he's not saying that there's like a there's like a you know, a ghost that put the beetle there, because that would be in some way causal. Instead, he's saying there's another force in the universe other than causality. It sort of runs parallel to causality that connects events

and and creates links of significance. But it's not physics, Okay, Like I kind of in making sense of it in my own head, I thought of it in terms of this room or recording in in which case we have wires that are running outside of the walls, then running across the floor and under the table, and then there are the wires within the wall that we cannot see. And so the wires that are running outside of the walls are are kind of like causality. We can we

can see them. We're in causality. We've our brain spends a lot of time making sense of cause and effect. But then there's this idea that there might be some other force at work within the walls. We can't see it, we're not we're not privy to it. It's exact in an ins and outs, but it's it's making things interconnected. It's it's these connections are popping up throughout our life,

throughout the times game. Yeah, causality connects events in the physical realm, and according to Young, synchronicity would connect events in sort of like the psychic meaningfulness realcom that it was this force it makes things have meaning and shows us meaning by bringing unlikely events together. Okay, so this would be kind of like in um, you seen Interstellar? Yes, okay, so there's the whole bit in there about love. Is this uh, this connecting force like that seems to line

up rather closely with this idea of synchronicity. Yeah, I think that makes sense. So coincidences obviously have this power over us. They captivate us, they seem significance. They make us wonder if there is some kind of magical or super psychic force at work. And sometimes it can be hard to tell because we don't know how to analyze coincidences. You know, like there when something happens, like you get a number nine from the coach check and then you're

in seat number nine. There's really no reason to ask why something like that happened, but you can perhaps ask, wait a minute, did anything significant actually happen? Indeed, now we've talked about the the sort of supernatural end of the pool, the idea that there is some sort of of intrinsic synchronicity connecting these these events. And now we're gonna we're gonna look at a more critical and more

skeptical side of the pool. Right, So, several times so far in this podcast we've referred ahead to a paper, and this is sort of a classic paper in statistics and mathematical analysis of coincidences, and it's called Methods for Studying Coincidences. It was published by the Journal of the American Statistical Association in December nineteen nine. I think it had been given at a been given as a presentation

in a couple of years before. But it's by Percy Diaconis and Frederick Moss Stellar, and they were I believe, Harvard mathematicians, and Diaconis and moss Stellar offer four main categories of explanation for seeming examples of synchronicity. You know, they refer to camera, they refer to young and they say, what what do we make of these events? And and how can we tell if something is actually going on that's worth noting. So the first of the options is

that there is an actual causal link. It's not a coincidence, because there's a cause that to seemingly disparate events happen together. Uh. The second one is psychology. It's something about the way our brains work, the fact that we're noticing what seemed to be coincidences, and will definitely have more on that later. Another point is what they call the multiplicity of end points, and this is going to be about how how we

count something as a hit. And then the last one that they site is called the law of truly large numbers, and that's going to be about statistical context. So I think we should go back and look at causes first. So when something happens that's seemingly just a huge coincidence, you should always consider the fact that there might be

a cause that's more obvious than you realize. Yeah, this would of course be the birthday problem, right, which is a problem that that people will encounter just everywhere, right and in your workplace, at school, et cetera. I mean we can encounter it right here in the podcast Chamber Joe Win your Birthday July six, Minds October six, whoa synchronicity? Are you serious? I'm serious? Were sixteen sixteen. Okay, what happened when you were sixteen? What city were you in? Oh, Paris, Tennessee.

I was in Tennessee too when I was sorry, I was in fatal Tennessee. But still Tennessee, Tennessee. Man, something weird is going on. Yeah, or but but worth noting here is notice how we're we're singling in on the hits. We totally missed the same day birthday by by many months, but we're counting as a hit because we both had sixteen. Yeah,

so here's the birthday problem. Let's say you're in a subway car and you're riding around with some random strangers, and because you are extremely rude, you start getting people's attention, getting them to take their headphones off, and you you ask the strangers in the car all of their birthdays. That's not rude, that's just good manners. I mean, it's a it's a nice breaker. Okay, Yeah, you might want to know if today's their birthday, and you should offer

them this cake that you found on the ground. Exactly. Yeah, So how many people would you have to ask before It's more likely than not that you'd find two people with the same exact birthday. Well, let's see three sixty five days in a year. Uh, so you'd think, well, maybe I need a talk to three d sixty five people, right, or maybe twice that. Yeah, I mean I'm not good at doing math like that immediately, but that's where I

would have gone the first place in my head. Okay, it's got to be like one in three sixty five times two or something like that. But no, the answer is twenty three. Okay, But we're not going to take the time to explain all the math. You can go look that up online. It is well documented. Uh, this is a classic problem. If you ask twenty three people in a room, in a train car, whatever, you have reached the fifty fifty odds that two of them will

have the same birthday. And one of the key points here is that you're not starting with the specified birthday. You're not saying how many people do I have to ask before I find somebody with my birthday? You're just trying to find one match, right, Yeah, in this group of if you ask twenty three people, odds are two of them will have the same birthday. What if you want to find three people with the same birthday, that's got to be astronomical, right I would think so. I

mean you think that would just multiply it. Yeah. No, Actually, if your train car can hold people, chances are in your favor you reach odds again if you ask a D eight. So that just shows that the statistical probability of in this case, this is a birthday match occurring, he's actually uh, far greater than we we we may get a credit at the surface. Yeah, I think the point is that we are often surprised by events that are not statistically unlikely at all, Like they just don't

match our intuitions. Basically, we we have exaggerated intuitions for how unlikely some things are, especially it turns out particular types of things, for example, things that happened to us. This is a funny thing. We're we're way more surprised about coincidences that happened to us than coincidences that happened to other people. Oh yeah, because we're all the center of our own stories, right, we're going to be We're

more interesting, We're more invested in this one. Um. I mean just to come back to back to the statistical possibilities, I mean, just thinking back to how we both were

like whoa sixteen whoa Tennessee. But when you really break it down, like the chances of us scoring the same day, I mean the same date within a month, that's what one and thirty one chance for the most part, and Tennessee what we could say, Well, we're both living and working in Atlanta, so there's probably a reasonable chance that we would come from a southern state, of which there are I mean, but not that many. There's very many

literature majors from Tennessee end up in Atlanta. That's not unusual, yea. Um, but so hey, there could be another cause though. So that's just the apparent cause. The cause that's um readily available, you just haven't looked at the math. There could also be a hidden cause. When something appears to be a coincidence, it's not actually a coincidence because there's an actual causal link that you don't know about. Um. The classic example

of this would be cheating and gambling. Yes, this is where a person rolls a dice, right, Yeah, So so you roll a pair of dice, you know, a hundred times in a row. And let's say you you roll a seven nineties six out of those hundred times. Yeah, like the more the more every time you roll when you get the same number he gets, that gets even

more astronomical. That have happened? How could that possibly have happened? Well, obviously if there's a hidden cause, which is the dice are loaded so that they will turn up a seven pretty much every time. So there you go. You don't have to be a god to do it. You just have to be a cheater with with a pair of loaded diet exactly. And another example comes to mind. This

was going back to Carl Young. Carl Young was associated with the physicist of Wolfgang Polly, and Paully was famous for coming up with the Poully exclusion principle, which is important in quantum mechanics. I don't remember exactly what it does right now, but it's something that's right. But yeah, he um. So he was a known physicist and it

did really important work. But Paul, I think, was also sort of interested in the you know, strange synchronicity type ideas, and Polly, in addition to the Polly principle, which is an actual principle of science, was known for the Polly effect, which is a more anecdotal effect. But the story goes like this everywhere Wolfgang Polly went, machines broke. Ah. This

is the classic watch stopper scenario. Yeah, so he would show up in a lab somewhere to test out some equipment and what do you know, the equipment and working today. Can't figure it out, And then he'd leave the lab and suddenly it'd start working again. Uh. We don't know how many of these stories are actually true, but this is a popular anecdotal legend, and we'll just accept that it's true for the purpose of the conversation that everywhere

he went it seemed like stuff wouldn't work. In fact, there was even one anecdote I read about where some people were working in a lab and their equipment stopped working, and they joked, is you know Wolf going here? Is as he'd come down the hall. Uh. And then later they found out that he just happened to have been changing trains in that city on that day at the time that their equipment malfunction. He has some long reaching effects. So whether or not that's true, right, let's go ahead

and settle now on. But but if it were true, you could perhaps look for actual hidden causes. It might not be a synchronistic coincidence that you know that the universe, the the Unice, the Unice Mundi is trying to tell Wolfgung Polly something about his relationship with machines or something. It could be perhaps that Polly had a habit of scuffing around his office carpet before heading into the lab, and that led him to discharge a lot of static

electricity which could break some really delicate instruments. Or Polly is just really clumsy. Yeah, And of course it's also not taken to account all the machines that are not breaking in Polly's life, right, it's literally everything he touches. Does it just fall apart and rust, you know, before his very eyes? Or is it just oh this thing broke? How could that happen? How get a machine and this little device made by human? How could this possibly stop working?

You know? So you end up that you end up honing in on those instances where it doesn't work, right. And it's also i think probably not communicating the reality about lab equipment, which is that it probably breaks all the time, and there's a lot of it. Any lab is going to have a lot of equipment, and all of it has a half life, and and and a death point. Yeah. Um so, so yeah, that's the idea of the hidden cause. And then, of course those are

just some hypothetical examples we're offering. The true hidden cause would be the one we haven't even thought of, you know, the cause that's an actual physical causal link that's causing things to malfunction in police presence, but we can't even guess what it is it might be there. Yeah, so I think we should move on to another one of the points that Diaconis and Mostell are making their paper, which is the quote multiplicity of end points or the

sort of like the cost of close point. Yeah, because if we have already illustrated close counts and coincidence, Like when we're talking about birthdays, we were looking for the same day in the same month, but we settled for sixteen. You know, we were looking for the same Tennessee town and oh my god, we accidentally went to the same high school and didn't realize it. But we'll settle for

just the same state. And that's what we're doing. We're we're constantly looking for these these little coins as to line up, and we'll settle for something that's close. And if you settle for close the statistical possibilities just blow up,

such as with the birthday situation. Um, if you want to uh to, uh to, if you want to hit a near birthday match with a group of people, so make sure you're back on the back in the train car and you're willing to to settle for all right, let's see who on this train car has a birthday within a day of each other. You know, we'll settle for a close match. Then you only seven people are needed for that chance. So yeah, so so coming down from from a perfect match to a near match just

opens it up tremendously. And then, of course, when you think about the accumulation effect that we were talking about earlier, it makes it much easier if you are accumulating close matches. You keep building up close matches, and over time they start to look significant because they just turned into hits in your memory. You know, you don't remember, well, that

was kind of close. You remember there's a hit, and then another hit, and then another hit, and some of these might be actual hits, some of these might be close hits, but they all kind of blend together. Yeah, this brings to mind like cold readings and uh, you know, and the whole psychic game right where you throw out, oh i'm i'm I think there's somebody named Joe in your life, and you know I have an uncle Joseph.

There you go, close becomes a perfect match and then in the blink of an eye, and then that is how you reckon your memory. Okay. Then, also when studying coincidences, that this is another category of of Diaconis and Mustellar. There's the law of truly large numbers. And this is a point about context. So let's say somebody encounters of an event that is truly incredibly unlikely for a person to experience. So it's not one of those things with

a hidden cause. It's not one of those things where the odds are actually, you know, much more probable than you realize. It's truly unlikely. You still have to consider context. You have to consider this event against the vast number of uncounted dice rolls of human experience that it is nestled in. So here's an analogy. Let's say you're talking to a professional poker player and she tells you one time she was playing five card poker and she was dealt a royal flush on the opening bet. Of a

hand then to trade any cards. She just got a royal flush. Now, the odds of being dealta royal flush are about one in six fifty thousand. I think it's like sixty nine thousand or something like that, about one and six. But you wouldn't say to this poker player, oh, you must be lying or like you know, or you must have been cheating in this game, because you understand

that the anecdote is in context. If she's a professional poker player, depending on how long she's playing, she might have been dealt hundreds of thousands of hands in her life. And on top of that, she's one player out of many, and maybe not everybody has had that experience. So when considered in context, really improbable events start looking like, oh, okay, well, yeah,

this is the one chance in however many. Yeah, this is kind of the you know, it's bound to happen eventually clause Right, Like ive enough people are trying a given thing, it's gonna line up. The monkeys are going to compose the complete works of Shakespeare with thin enough time. Yeah. So there are improbable events, but there are just a

lot of chances to achieve them. There are seven point three billion people on Earth today and according to the Population Reference Bureau, there is an estimated a hundred and

eight billion people who have ever lived. So considering that if there's an event that has a one in a million chance per year of occurring in somebody's life, let's say it's I don't know what the actual chance of this is, but having a baseball bat thrown over a wall and it hits you on the head or something, Uh, it should still happen to seventy three hundred people every year, just given the population of the Earth, that that is

the probability. If there's a one in ten billion chance of something ever occurring in a human's life, it should still have happened to at least ten people in human history.

And it it kind of comes back around to the idea of synchronicity, the union idea, because even though we're we're talking about about real numbers and uh, and just our sort of our inability to really make statistical sense of the actual odds of things, uh, those actual odds of the computation of those odds, they kind of exist within the wall. They kind of exist outside of our perception and our understanding of life in the small sense

in the individual sense. So in a way, uh, the synchronoy city lines up well with with it with the statistical likelihood of things happening. We're just we're just not privy to it. Yeah. I think that connects back to the fact that there is a personal significance for us, even if there is not a statistical significance. Again, it's not surprising that somebody won the lottery. It would be

really surprising if you won the lottery. That's not actually objectively surprising, it's just surprising to you, which of course brings us to psychology. Yeah, and we save this for last because I think this might be the most significant of all of these factors. And this is the fact that sometimes it's not even the numbers. Sometimes it's not even the data. It's just that we are wired to bow at the altar of coincidence. It's how our brains work. Indeed,

I mean, that's just how we survive. That's how we make sense of the stimuli in our environment, that's how we form our memories, and that's how we plan for the future. Yeah, So let's look at some psychological phenomenon that that are sort of related to our tendency to take note of coincidences and maybe a tribute to them more magical significance than they might actually have. Uh, how about you even heard of the batter main Hoff phenomenon. Yeah,

this is the frequency illusions. This is I guess the famous example of this would be you just learn a new word, you know, you either encounter in a book and he's like, WHOA, I don't know that when you look it up and your rather taken with it, and then it seems to pop up everywhere you just learned about it, and it's all around you. So it's like discovering a flower exists for the first time you've never seen before, and then suddenly it seems to be growing

in every pot across town. Yeah. Yeah, And so the weird name actually comes from a West German terrorist organization, doesn't have anything to do with them. Really. I read that the origin of this was that the phenomenon supposedly got its name because a message board user somewhere online told the story of encountering information about the bad or mine Hoff gang and then just suddenly seeing that again within like twenty four hours. Um, and I'm sure this

has happened to you. It's happened to me all the time. This actually happened to me while I was researching these podcasts were recording today. So in the other podcast we're recording today, Uh, there's a mention of Prince Cheep, a island off of the west coast of Africa, and I had when I when I got to them in the research, I realized I had just been reading about that island for the first time, like less than twenty four hours before,

for completely unrelated reason, not related to astronomy or anything. No, but see, Yeah, you see those kind of weird littal coincidences pop up, yeah all the time, And uh, I've often found that to be the case too, seemingly unrelated episodes, but there'll be some little thread that connects them. Um.

You know. Another example the frequency illusion that I often see is I'll I'll come across like a new concept or a concept I wasn't that familiar with, and I'll do a deep dive in in it for a podcast podcast such as h super Normal Stimuli was a big one, and after I researched it, I was just I was just seeing it everywhere like it it kind of a topic like that of you know sufficient depth. It kind of changes the way you look at the world and

then you see reflections of it just all around you. Yeah, and uh and and so it can be something as simple as a as a word. It can be something that's you know, a particular place, a particular you know, a particular band, a particular work of a literature, or it can be uh, you know, a philosophical mindset suddenly because you're aware of it, you're hyper aware of it, you're excited about it, You're going to see it in the rest of the world. Yeah, um, yeah, And there

there could be lots of reasons. One could be that hidden causal connection. You know, there are actually reasons that you're investigating similar stories around the same time or reading similar material that might use a new and unfamiliar word around the same time, because you have interests and drives that are sort of unified by time. Uh. Also, the authors of the paper we were talking about earlier, have they have their own sort of mathematical analysis of this,

don't they? And they sort of explain how it's not that unusual that you should, you know, at a certain point, after acquiring a word for the first time, see it again. Yeah, that's just sort of expected to happen. Yeah, they're just there. There's a finite number of words, so you're going to see them again. Um. And of course this plays into apophenia. Uh.

This is uh. This is a term comes to us from German scientists Claus Konrad, who coined apophenia from the Greek appo away and uh uh and Finian to show in n He was studying acute schizophrenia, during which connections and meanings seem to web together around unrelated details. So this is the basic idea here is we're always looking for patterns and signals from our environment. I mean, that's how we think, that's how we live, that's how we survive,

particularly when it comes to assessing threats. Okay, um, And so we have we often have this tendency to perceive patterns and connections in random or meaningless data. Um. For instance. Uh. One example that comes to mind here is you have some sort of silly police drama. On right, they're looking at a map of the city and they have little pins showing where the crimes are at. And then what do they see. They see like a pentagram rights some

sort of order. And of course in the show. It always makes sense, right, Like the the Satanic Killer actually is trying to kill people so that his crimes look like a pentagram in a map. But you can see that pentagram without any planning at all or some other symbol. Yeah, if you want to see that pentagram in the planning, you can see that pentagram in the planning of just about anything. Um. But what this basically breaks down to is a false positive in statistics, a type one error

in cognition. And this is something that plays into religion, gambling, conspiracy theory, and just are and also our need to see faces everywhere. Right, it's the reason we see uh, figures in the constellations in the sky, right. I mean i'd say very few people these days actually think that the stars were arranged to look like a figure from Greek myth. Yeah, because you think whoever was doing it would do a better job. I mean, yeah, it's it's not very good. It's kind of a crappy portrait, but

you know people saw it. Yeah, yeah, they saw the pattern and we just can't help but see. Patterns were pattern recognition engines, as we've mentioned before here. And there's the thing is there's an evolutionary advantage for us pattern recognition apes in making that type one air because essentially you have you have you have a type one air and you have a type two right false positive, false negative.

And the classic example is that of you know, rustling in the bushes on the on the prehistoric savannah, right, because there's a possibility that a big cat is about to spring out of those rustling bush bushes and kill us. Or it could be the statistical noise of wind. Exactly. A false positive just gets you hot and bothered over nothing and maybe a good laugh. I thought it was a tiger and it was just wind. But a false negative that gets you killed. Yeah, so obvious. There's obviously

a selection pressure to favor false positives. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, so that just plays into how we think and how we behave as humans and are overwhelming tendency to see the pattern when there isn't one, to see the connective tissue between events, in this case, when there isn't any right. So yeah, and so in that way a coincidence can represent a pattern to us, we start

thinking what does it mean? Yeah, I mean, and there's likely a connection between apophenia and creativity This is a theory that was put put forth by Swiss neurologist Peter Bruger Uh in a two thousand one book, Hauntings and Poulter Guy's Multi Disiplinary Perspectives. And he was studying apophenian patients suffering from psychotic episodes that were beginning to find

spontaneous meaning and random aspects of their life. And his research revealed that high levels of dopamine disposes his patients to find meetings, patterns, significance where there was there was none. So creativity apophenia, Uh, you know, it's what is creativity. But ultimately, you know, finding new patterns, new connections, new ways to arrange existing ideas and motifs uh into something new, right of course, Yeah, I mean we often see that

as sort of the core of the creative principle. It's you know, understanding like, oh, this is connected to this other thing. Very often the connections you see between events or objects or ideas and say a literature class or something like that, are they are still psychic phenomenon. It's something that we are putting together out of our need defined meaning, that's right, and a lot of times that meaning that we need to find. You know, we we already have our our minds made up about what that

meaning is. This brings us to confirmation bias, which of course is always a big one. This, of course is the idea that we have a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms your preconceptions about life, about about basically anything, which leads to statistical errors that cloud your decision and problem decision making a

problem solving ability. Yeah, so this would come into play if say you are already looking for a pattern of coincidences, say you've had to like to sort of synchronous strange events happen in one day, you're looking for a third and that's going to bias the way that you sample data. It's probably going to make you look for things that are sort of a close hit is something you might have ignored otherwise to confirm your pattern hypothesis that there's

gonna be something in line with this second thing. You know, it's the same like people dye in threes ideas just thinking of that. Yeah, like you, if you're lucky, you'll get like to a list celebrities dying at the same time. But then often like that third one has to be like a radio star for the days. You know, it's something that doesn't really match up, but you'll take it. It's totally fleets the prophecy exactly right. It's confirmation bias.

You're you're bringing it in because you've got to make it fit the pattern. Yeah, it's kind of like when you listen to an episode of This American Life and like the they have the theme for the show, and like the intro hits the theme, the second segment really hits the theme. The third segment and the second third segment, you know they mostly hit this theme, and that last one you're kind of like, I don't know close enough, close enough to close out the show, but you're really

kind of strayed from the overall theme. Um. But then that's pretty much how we approach life in general, whether you're talking about belief in UFOs, ancient Egyptians and alien tech, Bigfoot, or or you know, office conspiracies or whatever it happens to be. If you're looking for something to be true, uh, you can find it. That So it plays into scientific analysis. You have a you know, a theory you want and you want to see it proven out, and you subconsciously

scow your the results of the experimentation in your favor. Uh, you want to love that new movie that just hit the theaters, so you wind up looking for reasons to love it and focusing more on that and being perhaps a little less critical than you normally will. And then, of course there's a racial aspect too, right you You if you happen to distrust members of another racial group, you wind up focusing on the evidence that supports your

existing distrust rather than evidence that challenges it. Oh. Yeah, people are definitely likely to oversample stuff that confirms their bigotry or biases. So yeah, if if you have a preconceived stereotype, you're looking to make things fit evidence that doesn't fit it, you just kind of like, yeah, that's noise,

it doesn't matter. Yeah, I mean, for the most part, you're kind of maintaining the castle of you know, fortress sanity and fortress worldview and uh and and so you want to to focus as much on the stuff that keeps the walls up as possible. Yeah. Of course this all works perfectly because post addiction is largely a result of the brain's task of continually integrating sensory stimuli and reconciling conflicting information into a unified vision of reality, a

unified story again in which we are the central character. Yeah. I mean that's just simply how our memory. Yeah, I mean you always see the the pattern of clue is left by the mystery writer once you've had the ending revealed. You might not notice it while you're going through the

novel to the first time. So there you have it. Coincidence. Um. We we've kind of hit some of the the more you know, fringey ideas of what could be happening with this perceived synchronicity in life and what is actually going on when it comes to the statistics of the world around us and the way we perceive our world. Yeah.

So one of the authors of that paper we talked about earlier, Percy Diaconis, he had this quote that I saw in an interview or said, probability isn't a fact about the world, it's a fact about the observers and knowledge. And I think that's number one that seems very true, but also it's um, it's a good way of informing this discussion we've had about what coincidence means when you

actually examine probability and statistics. Very often, the real magic is happening inside our heads, in our in our quest to construct meaning in sort of are are actually the great links that we go through mentally to weave events together and produce tapestries of significance in our lives. So think about that the next time you know, some of these little coincidences pop up in your life and you start drawing those imaginary lines in the in the world

of synchronicity. Hey. In the meantime, if you want more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, if you want to read blog posts, you want to see videos, you want links out of social media accounts, you should head on over to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

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